The invention relates to a device or equipment as well as to a method for the simultaneous, fractionating operation of several parallel chromatography columns. The equipment and the method can be utilized in a particularly advantageous manner in research, within the context of organic synthesis for simultaneous, parallel separation, isolation, and purification of many chemical compounds, such as new active ingredients for medicaments, and especially on the semi-preparative scale.
Column chromatography is a typical method for separating substance mixtures in organic synthesis, especially in the form of a liquid-solid chromatography. Modern pharmaceutical research, therefore, would be unthinkable without column chromatography as a method for isolating and subsequently identifying synthesized organic substances. Since the identification a new type of active ingredient continues to be a difficult and expensive enterprise which necessitates the synthesis of a large number of chemical compounds, the need for innovations with respect to equipment and method still persists. The role of so-called combinatorial synthesis is becoming increasingly important for both the search for as well as the optimization of guide structures, in order to produce chemical compounds within smaller and smaller periods of time. To the extent that systematic molecular variation by way of combinatorial synthesis results in a plurality of different compounds extremely quickly, other methods applied within the context of searching for active ingredients--for example methods for separating substance mixtures or for isolating and purifying individual substances--must also stay apace with the heightened synthesis capacity. For example, although it still was sufficient for classical synthesis procedures to subject the synthesized compounds to a chromatography individually and, if necessary, sequentially, modern synthesis methods with a higher capacity as well as combinatorial chemistry also require a heightened output capacity during the separation of substance mixtures or during the isolation and purification of synthesized compounds, and especially on a semi-preparative scale.